Social media has become an integral part of modern life. Social media services, such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and others, allow users to keep friends, acquaintances, and even the general public up to date on their current life events; from weddings to divorces, from checking in to the labor and delivery unit at a hospital to checking out at a funeral, and from getting home from work to leaving home for a long vacation. Some examples of social media updates include text-based status updates, videos, pictures, location check-ins, and friends tagging, or associating, the user with a particular post.
Social media provides the user the ability to communicate with many people; however, sharing updates on social media sites leads to privacy issues, including location privacy issues. The user's location information can be divulged in a variety of ways using social media. A user on vacation away from home may update a social media service with text updates about where they are at or may post pictures and videos. The user's location can be revealed explicitly (e.g. a text update stating, “Just landed in Hawaii! Great Vacation Weather!”), implicitly (e.g. a photograph of the user normally residing in New York standing in front of the Eiffel Tower), or through hidden or non-hidden metadata embedded in the social media post (e.g. time and location metadata stored in a pictures data or a social media update automatically tagged with the user's location).